Writings

Falseness close to kin

The picture necessarily fails both its maker and its subject matter. As painful as that sounds, it's actually ok: as a new thing in the world, the photograph is not to be judged by fidelity to mind...

On hope

Past experience (the self) and the current moment (the world outside the self) come together in a creative moment that only exists because of our hope, because we realize the possibility of bridgin...

The beauty in what remains

Raymond Meeks’s work challenges us, at those moments in our lives where a cycle comes full circle, to look for the beauty in what remains. Because only in that beauty can we find the reasons to mov...

On photography and generosity

Somewhere around the end of last summer, I posted a photograph on Facebook. It was a rather unknown black and white photograph by the late Saul Leiter of his sister Deborah. It was made in 1947. I ...

Being boring

The World Cup is boring. Novels are boring. Baseball is mostly boring. Anything that's not a constant highlight reel is boring.  So let us now praise these and many other things uneventful. It's w...

On cultivation

Over the years, I’ve had a number of friends who, after we’ve known each other for a while, have put it to me delicately that they don’t “understand” photography as an art form. Most of them actua...